South Korea Preparing a Bill For Complete Ban on Cryptocurrency Trading

South Korea intensifies its crackdown on cryptocurrencies as overall markets take a major dive.

The cryptocurrency markets are under heavy correction following the news coming from South Korea which states that the government officials are preparing a bill to bring to bring a complete ban on cryptocurrency trading in the country.

South Korea’s justice minister Park Sang-ki told on Thursday that the government is preparing a bill to introduce a complete ban on trading of virtual digital currencies on local exchanges. While talking at a press conference at the ministry’s press office, Sang-ki said: “There are great concerns regarding virtual currencies and justice ministry is basically preparing a bill to ban cryptocurrency trading through exchanges.”

A press official present at the conference said that the decision to propose a ban was made after “enough discussion” with officials from South Korean government agencies, financial regulators and nation’s finance ministry. The South Korean news service SBS reported that “The Ministry of Justice will set up its own bill, which sees the virtual money brokerage itself as illegal and completely closes the exchange, and plans to start full-fledged ministry discussions this week.”

Soon after this news, the markets were gripped with fear as a huge sell-off can be witnessed in the past 24 hours. Major currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereal which receive a lot of trading volumes from the Korean country were the most affected.

Bitcoin plunged by more than 13% or nearly $2000 in value. As per our data, Bitcoin collapsed to as low as $13000 before finally recovering and is currently trading at around $13800 levels, at the press time. Ethereal too, which has been having a crazy run since the start of 2018 was seen correcting majorly to hit a low of around $1100 from $1350 levels. The altcoin, however, has managed to gain 10% from this low and is currently trading above $1200.

One of the major reasons why the Korean government is intensifying its grip on the crypto activities in the country is because the craze behind crypto trading has reached to unsurmountable levels affecting the youth as well as across every age group of Korean citizens.

The South Korean crypto exchanges over the past few months were seen flooded with a huge number of investors which just continues to increase with each passing day.

Owing to such investor behaviour, the officials are now expanding their reach and are even performing an on-site investigation on exchanges like Coinone and Bithumb. The South Korean National Tax Service (NTS) is said to be behind this investigation.

Bithumb was quoted saying “It’s true that the NTS has come out with an investigation, but it is difficult to confirm the details of the investigation.” While on the other hand, a Coinone employee told Reuters that “Local police also have been investigating our company since last year, they think what we do is gambling.”